Forgive The Inexcusable

It helps me to know where these words began. They come from a short piece by C.S. Lewis usually called “On Forgiveness”, written in 1947 for a parish magazine, the kind of small church publication most people never see. It is barely more than a thousand words, and Lewis sent it off to a parish priest rather than to a publisher. It only reached a wide readership long after he died, eventually gathered into the collection your source names, The Weight of Glory.

That origin matters to me. This is not Lewis the celebrated Oxford don performing for a crowd. It is a believer trying to be honest with ordinary churchgoers about something most of us find nearly unbearable in practice. Lewis had come to faith only in his thirties, after years as an atheist, and he never wrote about Christian living as a man who found it easy. He writes about forgiveness the way a fellow patient might describe a treatment he is still undergoing, not the way a doctor describes a cure he has mastered. I trust him more for that.

The hinge of the whole quote is a distinction we blur constantly, and the short reflection already names it. I want to press on the actual words, because the difference is not pedantic. To excuse a wrong is to say there was, after all, a good reason for it, and that the person was not really to blame. To forgive is the opposite move. It starts by admitting there is no good reason, that the person genuinely is to blame, and it releases them anyway.

Notice what that means. The two acts cannot land on the same wrong at once. If I have truly excused something, I have not forgiven it, because there is nothing left to forgive. Forgiveness only switches on at the exact point where excuse-making fails. Lewis sets the word “inexcusable” in the sentence on purpose. He is not reaching for drama. He means the thing you cannot explain away, the wound that stays a wound. That is the only place real forgiveness ever has work to do, and it is why it costs what it costs.

What anchors the saying for me is that Lewis is not inventing a clever paradox. He is drawing out something Jesus put into the prayer he gave us. In Matthew 6 the Lord ties our being forgiven to our forgiving others, and a few verses on he says it again plainly: if we will not forgive, neither will our Father forgive us. Lewis took that as gravely as it is meant.

The scripture your source echoes, Ephesians 4:32, points the same way, calling us to forgive one another as God in Christ forgave us. The pattern is always God first, then us. Jesus told a whole parable about it in Matthew 18, the servant let off an impossible debt who then seizes a fellow servant over a trifling one. The point is never that our forgiving earns God’s forgiveness. It is that mercy received is meant to flow on through us, and a heart that clamps shut on others has not yet felt the weight of its own debt cancelled. Lewis simply hands that truth back in a single sentence.

Forgiveness rarely behaves like a clean transaction, and the source already mentions Lewis finding old resentment surface again long after he thought the matter settled. I will not repeat that ground so much as stand where it leaves us. When the grievance climbs back into the room, dragged in by a smell or a song or an offhand remark, the question is what you do with it.

I used to assume the return of resentment proved the first forgiveness had been fake. I now think the resurfacing is not failure but the next instalment falling due. You forgive again, and you may keep paying it down for years. What steadies me is exactly where Lewis tells me to begin, not with the size of what someone owes me, but with the size of what I owed God and owe no longer. When I genuinely remember my own inexcusable things, the ones quietly cancelled, my grip on another person’s debt tends to loosen by itself. Not because the wrong shrank, but because mercy got there first.

• Is there a wrong I keep trying to excuse, telling myself it was not so bad, when the harder and freer thing on offer is to forgive it instead?
• When my forgiveness of someone keeps coming undone, can I treat that as the next instalment to hand over, rather than proof that I failed?
• What are the inexcusable things in my own life that were cancelled all the same, and when did I last let myself feel the weight of that?
• Who comes to mind at the word “inexcusable”, and am I willing to start today not with their debt to me but with mine to God?

If it would help to keep sitting with this, you might read more from C.S. Lewis or look at what Scripture itself says in our Bible verses about forgiveness.